The real elephant in the room is Kickstarter's all or nothing set-up, which generally I really like.

But when you raise more than the money you ask for, what do you do with the rest?

For one, you could just make what you promised and pocket it. But I think the hue-and-cry would be awful.

For two, you could donate the extra to charity. But people backing project aren't backing your charity - I mean, you could add that as a stretch goal so people know early on, but it still seems weird.

The result that most take is to add more to what they initially offered. And I do believe this is the right way to go, but I think the problem is always the oversell. They offer too much for what they are getting in return.

$10 or $15 gets you the finished game, one that will cost $20 on release? This isn't a pre-order, this is supporting a vision. I think this is a very bad decision. You could argue money ahead of completion is better than money after completion, and there's probably economic methods of proving that, but it's one way you are potentially short-selling yourself.

Many, many physical rewards. These need to be prototyped, made and shipped - and those orders need to be fulfilled, which is man-hours of packing boxes. Those costs cannot be hand-waved as "us devs will put in time after work and on weekends" for projects with thousands, or tens of thousands of backers! It's better to do less, or make the physical rewards LIMITED and EXPENSIVE. People should be thinking "what, $100 for a $20 game and a $15 t-shirt? that's not a good buy!" because it ISN'T a store, it's a fund-raiser.

I could go on, but I won't.

I'm a huge supporter of Kickstarter and games being made on Kickstarter, but I don't want the opportunity closed because people like Tim Schafer dream too big and fail at doing business-related arithmetic.